Pitchmarks #59 - 11th August 2024 - The Ones That Got Away
We golfers understand - better than anyone, I suspect - the concept of “what might have been”. The “if’s” and “but’s”; the “could have’s”. Spend a little time working in golf - probably a summer afternoon would do it - and you will bear witness to a kind of confession that is by its very nature unique, but whose through-line is consistent: “I left a few out there”.
What is really happening is that the player - yourself included, though you probably think your own tale of woe is more interesting than theirs - is getting it off their chest. A problem shared, etc. You are the low-paid therapist; they are getting their money’s worth and some. You come to understand their own very personal version of “the ones that got away”.
In a way, the fact that we pick over the bones of these golfing adventures just shows how much we care, but such regrets are rooted only in the past, and “the past is prologue”, as Shakespeare warned us. Another apparently prolific quote-smith, Mark Twain, had already hinted that he didn’t get golf when he called it “a good walk spoiled”, but he confirms this beyond all doubt with a later declaration that “the past, but there is but one good thing about it, and that is, that it is the past - we don't have to see it again”.
For the spurned golfer, deluded enough to not cancel out their bad bounces against all their good ones in golf’s eternal ledger, we do “have to see it again". Over and over again. Those cruel lip-outs, that vicious slice over the wall. The duffs, the fats. The sh*nks. They are lodged in our psyche, hiding under our eye-lids, lurking in our dreams. “The ones that got away…”
But here - in the strange calm of my return to this old writing desk, while the rest of the world lies asleep - here is something different. It’s a first cousin of the strokes that “got away”, but an experience instead. An experience I almost had, and didn’t. But this one isn’t forever shackled to an unchangeable past, for it also has one foot in the future. A future that will surely one day become a present, now I have a taste of what lies waiting.
It was the briefest of glimpses, short enough to be breathless, and it did whip my breath away. In the fluttering of the red flag, whose “12” tells its own story; in the laughter floating on the breeze from the sandy shore beneath. In the gentle rhythm of the crashing waves; in the casual ripples of the linksland grasses. In the weather-worn smiles of those about to play. In all of that and more, I recognised love, and the world stopped still.
And so, as I drive away, and the car park turns to blacktop, and Blackwaterfoot to Brodick via Ballymichael, the feeling high in my chest is of not wanting to go yet, or of already needing to return. And the ferry begins to move, and the clouds swirl to hide this glorious Arran behind me, and Holy Island along with it, though the whole place feels sacred to me.
And so this time, one “got away”. But this one, this “Shiskine”, has only “got away” for now. This time around, I left no shots out there, no “if’s” or “but’s”. Only a part of my heart, and I’ll be heading back for that just as soon as I can…
Kerry, July 1991, a Sunday afternoon, Waterville - I felt the same. And I’ve been back, many times, magical. The only course where I played twice in a day without making a single par … and was still enchanted.
I’ve only played Shiskine once and that was 30 years ago on a Saturday evening after playing Brodick. Have always meant to go back to play it again along with some of the other courses on Arran like Corrie and Lamlash.